Setting Up Your Custom Email Address

Google’s Workspace service can help you with a lot of things, but one of the most notable features is that it hosts your email for you and lets you use the Gmail interface with your own domain name (e.g., [email protected]), thus giving you a professional email address, all for the low price of $6/user/month.

That makes it a great option as an email hosting solution for your business.

In this how to set up Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) tutorial, we’ll take you through every step that you need to take to get Google Workspace working with your website and running your professional email address.

By the end, you’ll have a working email account hosted through Google Workspace, as well as access to all the other Google Workspace functionalities (Google apps, like Google Hangouts, separate Google Drive storage for Docs, Sheets, etc.). A nicely set up G Suite / Google Workspace is equally useful for small businesses with only a small number of employees – even nonprofits.

Let’s dive in!

How to set up Google Workspace (G Suite) #

Here’s a quick overview of the steps that you’ll need to take to configure Google Workspace with your website and professional email address:

1. Register an account and go through the Google Workspace setup wizard
2. Add other users to your account (optional)
3. Verify domain ownership with Google by adding a TXT record to your DNS records
4. Set up email by adding MX records

Ready? Here’s how to set up Google Workspace…

Complete the Google Workspace (G Suite) account setup wizard #

To get started, you’ll need to create your own Google Workspace account.

To do that, head here and click the big Get Started button:

This will launch the account setup wizard, which will prompt you to provide Google with some information.

First, enter some basic information about your account. Then, click Next:

On the next screen, you’ll need to enter the information for your Google Workspace admin account.

If you’ve already set up email somewhere else, you use that email in the Current email address box. Otherwise, you can enter a personal email address:

Next, indicate whether your business already has a domain name. If you already have a website that you want to use with Google Workspace, you should choose Yes, I Have One I Can Use:

Then, enter your existing domain name in the box and click Next:

Then, click Next again to confirm that you want to use that domain name:

After that, you’ll need to enter a secondary recovery email address, which you’ll use in case you can’t access your primary email address. For example, you could enter your personal Gmail account here, if you have one:

Then, you’ll need to enter a username and password that you’ll use to sign into Google Workspace. Your username will be your business email address by default (i.e., [email protected]), so you should keep that in mind when choosing which username to use.

Then, click Agree And Create Account to finish the process:

Add other people to Google Workspace (optional) #

Once you finish the wizard above, you’ll see a confirmation that your account was created, as well as a button to Go To Setup. Go ahead and click that button:

If you want to give other people access to your shared Google Workspace account, click Start next to Add people to your Google Workspace account. Then, you’ll be able to add additional users.

If you’re the only person who will use this Google Workspace account, just check the box for I added all user email… and click Next:

Verify your domain name with Google #

Now is when you start getting into the more technical aspects of how to set up Google Workspace (G Suite).

First, you’ll need to verify your domain ownership with Google by adding something called a TXT record.

To help you do this, Google will try to detect where your domain is hosted and provide instructions. If you followed our guide on where to purchase your domain name, this will be Porkbun.com.

These instructions are actually pretty helpful, so they may be all you need.

At your domain registrar, find your domain name and edit the DNS settings.

Then, you need to use the form to add a TXT record that contains the information from the Google Workspace (G Suite) website:

1. Name – your domain name
2. TTL – 86400
3. Type – TXT
4. TXT Data – copy and paste from the Google Workspace (G Suite) interface (click below if you’re not sure where to find this)

Click if you can’t find the text for the TXT Data field

Add MX records for your professional email address #

Next, you need to complete one more technical step and add something called MX Records. These are the things that allow Google Workspace (G Suite) to handle email for your new domain name.

Again, this will be controlled at your domain registrar where you entered your TXT record.

You can manually delete the existing MX Record entries and then use the form to add the following entries:

PRIORITY	DESTINATION
1	ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5	ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10	ALT3.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10	ALT4.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

Once you’ve finished adding the entries, go back to the Google Workspace (G Suite) interface and click the Verify Domain And Set Up Email button:

And if you did everything correctly, you should get a success message:

You just set up Google Workspace (G Suite) and your email should start working soon – enjoy! Note, it might take a few hours before your email starts working, so don’t worry if you don’t receive new emails right away.

Wrap up + how to manage your new Google Workspace (G Suite) account #

At this point, you’ve set up Google Workspace (G Suite) and your professional email address should be working.

You can switch to your new Google Workspace (G Suite) account by clicking on the icon in the top-right corner.

And if you need to manage your Google Workspace (G Suite) account – like adding new users or managing apps – you can do that from the Google Workspace (G Suite) Admin Console: